Notes 1 Introduction: ‘Am I that name’? 1. On the issue of essentialism, Diana Fuss helpfully notes that ‘to insist that essentialism is always and everywhere reactionary is, for the construction- ist, to buy into essentialism in the very act of making the charge; it is to act as if essentialism has an essence’ (1989: 21; Fuss’s emphasis). 2. Karlyn Crowley states that the ‘Goddess movement and its literature, read by a larger audience than one might expect, have grown to such a degree that it has been called “one of the most striking religious success stories of the late twentieth century”’ by Philip G. Davis, whom she labels a ‘conservative scholar’ (Davis, 1998: 4; Crowley, 2011: 19, 113). 3. Compare the last scene of Henry V, in which Burgundy and King Henry joke about the prospect of the English king’s ‘naked blind boy’ (erect penis) appearing in Princess Katharine’s ‘naked seeing self’ (vagina) (V. ii. 299). 4. Many women in contemporary society do regard the goddess as a serious religious deity, especially practitioners of Dianic Wicca. See feminist the- ology scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether for a summary of the develop- ment of feminist neopaganism; Ruether notes that ‘In the mid-1970s, the neopagan movement began to organize on national and regional levels and to seek legal status as a recognized American religion’ (2005: 292). Some femininist neopagans lead or take tours to sites of ancient goddess temples (Crowley, 2011: 120; Ruether, 2005: 288). 5. Although female homosexual desire in Shakespeare’s work will be dis- cussed somewhat in Chapter 5, the focus of this book will primarily be on female heterosexuality. 6. Lavinia of Titus Andronicus, for example, relates her experience to the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Philomela. 7. In the introduction of his book, Maurice Charney states that ‘Shakespeare’s conception of love doesn’t fit Ficino’s Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas, in which physical love is always transcended to something higher and more spiritual’; instead, ‘Love in Shakespeare expresses itself in physical desire, and even at its most rapturous (as in Romeo and Juliet) never loses its sexual underpinnings’ (2000: 1–2). In the conclusion of his book, Stanley Wells recounts that, as he focused on the subject of sex in Shakespeare’s works, he realized that Shakespeare ‘continually saw sex as an instrument of relationships between people, and one that cannot – or should not – be divorced from love’, as he ‘knew of the dangers of mistaking animal desire for a higher passion, that the sexual instinct is one that may be misused, that it can lead to rape and murder, to a prostitution of all that is best in man’, though he ‘knew too that sex is an essential component of even the 159 160 Notes to Chapter 2 highest forms of human love, that it can lead to a sublime realization of the self in a near-mystical union of personalities’ (2010: 250). 8. Crowley states that ‘The New Age is usually defined as an umbrella term for diverse spiritual, social, and political beliefs and practices that attempt to promote personal and societal change through spiritual transformation’ (2011: 27). 9. Ruether (2005: 267–71) explains that first-wave feminism developed a political/spiritual rift similar to that of second-wave feminism. 2 ‘Made to write “whore” upon?’: Male and Female Use of the Word ‘Whore’ 1. See Frankie Rubinstein (1989) and Gordon Williams (1994) on these other terms of sexual insult in Shakespeare’s works. 2. In the 2013 online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, there are a few changes from the 1933 and 1977 print versions, but they are only in slight modifications of the dating of some of the citations, not in which or how many citations come from Shakespeare or in the definitions themselves as quoted in this chapter. I quote from the 1933/1977 print versions and the 1986 print supplement. 3. In order to keep length manageable, I do not here analyze Shakespeare’s uses of ‘whoremaster’ (5 instances), ‘whoremasterly’ (1), ‘whoreson’ (40), and ‘whoresons’ (1), which, although dependent on the notion of female as ‘whore’, are applied exclusively to male characters. Marvin Spevack’s The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973), my initial guide to locating the citations, lists one further instance of ‘whore’ as noun, ‘to be his whore is witless’, II. iv. 5 of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play not included in the Shakespeare folios, but that most contemporary scholars believe to have been co-authored by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. As I cannot be certain that Shakespeare rather than Fletcher wrote that line, I do not consider it here, although its implications do not contradict my overall argument. Interestingly, no form of the word ‘whore’ appears in The Comedy of Errors, which includes a courtesan among its characters, nor is it found in Pericles, which features a brothel as one of its settings and three bawds among its characters. The near-absence of use of the word ‘whore’ in Shakespeare’s comedies, in contrast with the tragedies, is consistent with their more playful attitudes toward language and their increased acceptance of female sexuality as part of the reproductive processes of nature. 4. See my essay ‘A Presentist Analysis of Joan, la Pucelle’ (2009) for more extensive analysis of Shakespeare’s treatment of Joan in 1 Henry VI. 5. More information on brothels in this period can be found in Burford (1993). 6. For further interpretation of this play, see my essay ‘Paying Tribute: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the “Woman’s Part”, and Italy’ (1995). 7. My essay ‘Hamlet’s Whores’ (1994) analyzes the play’s ‘whore’ images in more detail. Notes to Chapter 3 161 8. In my forthcoming essay ‘Shakespeare’s Quantum Physics: Merry Wives as a Feminist “Parallel Universe” of 2 Henry IV’ (2014), I explore this pros- pect through concepts borrowed from contemporary quantum physics. 9. Although Bevington follows the folios in beginning this passage with ‘My [Othello’s] name’, many other editors prefer the quarto’s ‘Her [Desdemona’s] name’, as do I. See the discussion by editors on the issue provided by Furness in the New Variorum edition of Othello (205, gloss number 445) and the account in its Appendix of the play’s textual history (336–43). The choice of ‘My name’, though, does not invalidate the sense of my argument here, as the name being blackened through masculine inscription is emblematic of feminine chastity through the metaphoric comparison to Diana. 10. Emilia’s bold speeches to Desdemona about female sexual equality (among other positive attributes of her character) inspired Carol Thomas Neely (1980), in a justly famous article on the play, to break out from the pack of commentators on Othello whom she described as Othello, Iago, or Desdemona critics, in order to name herself an ‘Emilia critic’. Yet, for all of her brave talk, Emilia is complicitous in the male vilification of female sexuality in Othello in a way that Bianca is not, which leads me to name myself a ‘Bianca critic’. 3 ‘Enough to make a whore forswear her trade’: Prostitution as Woman’s ‘Oldest Profession’ 1. The term ‘Henriad’ is one that critics have invented to refer to Parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV and to Henry V, the three plays of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays that deal with the political development of the character who becomes King Henry V. Although King Henry IV refers to this character, his eldest son, as ‘Harry’, as does the character himself, Falstaff calls him ‘Hal’, and critics tend to use that name for him in the Henry IV plays more often than they do ‘Harry’, particularly when dis- cussing the tavern scenes and any of his interactions with Falstaff. Before Henry IV becomes king, he is usually called ‘Bolingbroke’. 2. One additional female sex worker, Bridget, is mentioned by name once in Measure for Measure; as Pompey is being led to prison, Lucio asks him, ‘Does Bridget paint [use cosmetics] still, Pompey, ha?’ (III. ii. 78). 3. Many historians and anthropologists have written on this subject; one does not need to dig far into scholarly treatments of the history of pros- titution to find accounts of ritual prostitution, documented in many ancient sources. Some recent writers argue that earlier authors may have overestimated how widespread the practice was in ancient cultures, but there is no doubt but that sacred ritual prostitution was definitely prac- ticed in temples of various ancient goddesses, in several cultures, and that it preceded secular, or ‘profane’, prostitution. 4. Depictions of prostitution by Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists are outside of the scope of this book; for astute analysis of prostitutes in other 162 Notes to Chapter 3 early modern playwrights’ work, see the books by Anne Haselkorn (1983) and Angela Ingram (1984). 5. When Prince Hal first hears about Falstaff’s planned assignation, he says, ‘This Doll Tearsheet must be some road’, to which Poins answers, ‘I war- rant you, as common as the way between St. Albans and London’ (II. ii. 158–60). As Hal is a frequent patron of the tavern, the fact that he did not know of Doll is further evidence that the tavern’s provision of sexual services is comparatively recent. At this point, it is probable that Doll is the only sex worker at the tavern. Burford notes that on the Bankside in the 1500s, ‘the distinction between inn and brothel was a very fine one’ (1993: 126). 6. Burford states that in the early modern period ‘life expectancy was very short: only 10 per cent of the population reached the age of forty and females had a shorter life span than men’, with prostitutes ‘doomed to an even shorter life because of the mode of life thrust upon them and the probability that if they lived longer, dissipation and disease would take a further toll and by the age of forty they would be old hags.’ In addition, they were often ‘suffering from a venereal disease, and frequently tuber- culosis into the bargain’ (1993: 174–5).